catholic – Hot Airhttp://hotair.com
The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:01:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432What could go wrong? The “Trump and Clinton roast each other at the Al Smith dinner” live threadhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/20/go-wrong-clinton-trump-roast-al-smith-dinner-live-thread/
Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:01:38 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3928054The Al Smith dinner is one of the oddest traditions in presidential politics. By design, it interrupts the most cutthroat stage of the campaign, when the two candidates are killing each other in the last push before Election Day, for an evening of comity and comedy. They sit a seat apart from each other, with New York City’s cardinal as a buffer between them, and roast each other in 10-minute speeches for charity. Everyone laughs, everyone’s chummy, everything’s in good sport. Then they go back out on the campaign trail and kill each other again. The vibe isn’t the same as the sleazy White House Correspondents Dinner, which is dedicated to backslapping and stargazing among Washington’s political class, but there’s an element of overlap in the idea that politics — even at a moment of maximum discord — can lightly be set aside in the interest of socializing for an evening.

Tonight’s dinner is weirder than usual because of how nasty the campaign’s gotten. Clinton’s allies are running around accusing Trump of sexual assault; Trump’s allies are running around accusing Clinton’s husband of the same thing. Trump calls Clinton the epitome of corruption and says he’ll lock her up if elected; Clinton’s message distilled is that Trump is a would-be fascist who shouldn’t get within a thousand miles of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Somehow all of this will, supposedly, be summarily dropped for some good-natured japes and ribbing. Emphasis on “supposedly”: Trump has proved that he can take a joke at his own expense, but maybe not when it’s being aimed at him by a political enemy. And typically the roasting at this dinner involves plenty of self-deprecating gags by the candidates. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Trump goof on himself. It seems completely alien to his nature.

Point being, this could be endearing, with Trump seizing an opportunity to build some goodwill on the cheap by poking fun at himself, or it could turn into a total sh*tshow, with Clinton struggling to deliver a joke in a recognizably human way and Trump getting far, far too personal in his shots at her and Bill. It airs live on C-SPAN at 8:45 ET but I assume CNN and other cable nets will also break in to carry the speeches live. This is the last time the candidates will share a stage before the vote, which means it’s your last chance to watch Trump interact with a Clinton until, inevitably, he and Bill are playing golf together again next year. Here’s a thread for reaction.

While we wait, enjoy the surprisingly effective comedy stylings of Willard Mitt Romney from the 2012 dinner.

]]>3928054Important news from Chris Christie: I’ve used birth control, and not just the rhythm methodhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/04/important-news-from-chris-christie-ive-used-birth-control-and-not-just-the-rhythm-method/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/04/important-news-from-chris-christie-ive-used-birth-control-and-not-just-the-rhythm-method/#commentsTue, 04 Aug 2015 21:21:47 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3872317Ace is right that what Christie allegedly said today about limiting exemptions from antidiscimination laws in gay marriage cases to religious institutions is more important than this silliness, but I don’t want to hammer him for that without a direct transcript and I can’t find one anywhere. If he said what he’s claimed to have said, he’ll say it again in a more visible forum eventually. In the meantime we’re left with the clip below, which I want to call a palate cleanser except … I don’t feel cleansed.

He promised to “tell it like it is,” so here “it” is, in all its glory. In fairness to him, this wasn’t a random TMI but something offered in service to a larger point about policy. A questioner stood up and cited Bible verses to support environmentalism and a less warlike foreign policy. Christie’s reply: We don’t always follow religion as best practices, do we?

“We should all acquit ourselves in a way that we believe is consistent with the teachings that we follow, if we follow certain teachings from a religious perspective,” Christie said. “That’s what I’ll always continue to try to do. Me for instance, I’m a Catholic, but I’ve used birth control, and not just the rhythm method, ok. So, you know, my church has a teaching against birth control. Does that make me an awful Catholic because I believed and practiced that function during part of my life? I don’t think so.”

You need to watch it for the full experience, and by “full experience” I mean the guy in the foreground who instinctively covers his eyes in horror at Christie’s mention of the rhythm method. Anyway, I may be just a simple atheist caveman but I don’t follow how he gets from saying he tries to behave in ways that are consistent with the teachings of his church to shrugging off using birth control even though the Church discourages it. The traditional line on why the president needn’t follow religious teachings is that he’s duty-bound to do what’s best for the country in his opinion even if, as in cases of war, his faith discourages it. It’s a momentous obligation, so Christie naturally illustrates with … his preference for condoms over the rhythm method? Huh? Isn’t he competing for socially conservative voters who like the Church’s teachings on abstinence in lieu of contraception?

Ah well. He’ll still make a fine VP for President Trump.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/08/04/important-news-from-chris-christie-ive-used-birth-control-and-not-just-the-rhythm-method/feed/553872317Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/24/quotes-of-the-day-2062/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/24/quotes-of-the-day-2062/#commentsMon, 25 May 2015 00:01:12 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3863859Voters in Ireland overwhelmingly chose to change their nation’s constitution Friday, becoming the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through popular vote…

Voter turnout in the majority Catholic nation was more than 60%, according to Fhlanghaile.

Despite speculation in the run-up that opposition to the measure might have been understated because people were too shy to tell pollsters that they planned to vote “no” — the outcome was lopsided, with the measure passing by just over 61% of the total vote cast.

“A new beginning” said its front page, which carried a picture of a lesbian couple who plan to marry as others in the background jumped in the air waving the rainbow flag…

The Irish Sunday Mirror said a “No” vote would have reinforced “tired stereotypes of a small-minded, God-fearing Catholic country”, but the result “knocked this notion out of the park”.

***

“I’m a gay Irish-Catholic American and I’m here to bear witness to history and to show that the people from whom I descend are leading the way socially. I think that Europe and the rest of the world needs to wake up and realise where social liberalism is really happening. Look at the smoking ban and now this. It seems like if it can happen here, the argument against it anywhere is severely undermined.”

But he warned equality campaigners that there would be a backlash. “The last kicks of the dying mule are the meanest and the hardest. Just when we thought we were getting progress by electing a black man in the United States of America, all of a sudden it gave licence to all these crazy racists to go on Twitter and say “I hate niggers”. They feel like it’s okay in polite company to do that. There are a lot of people who did not vote for this and this is going to hurt them.”

***

But this referendum was about more than just the right to marry. Much, much more. It was the manifestation of a social revolution that’s been simmering away in Ireland for some time…

It used to be that Irishness was defined by affection for the Catholic Church and resistance to European liberal trends. So stubborn was this identity that the country took longer than the rest of Western Europe to embrace secularism. But the paedophile revelations of the 1990s rightly rocked faith in the Church as an institution, while a series of recent scandals shook faith in its actual theology. The latter set of outrages were, frankly, distortions of the facts. It was wrongly claimed that a woman had been allowed to die because Catholic doctors would not give her a life saving abortion (no such thing even exists). It was falsely charged that a Catholic children’s home had dumped the bodies of hundreds of unwanted babies into a septic tank. Never mind that both stories crumbled under scrutiny – the popularity of them spoke to a growing sense that everything wrong with Ireland was due to the imported tyranny of Catholicism. Shake off the last remnants of traditional religious authority, it was reasoned, and Ireland could finally join the 21st century. Au revoir, Father Ted.

To emphasise, the Yes vote was undoubtedly a reflection of growing tolerance towards gays and lesbians. But it was also a politically trendy, media backed, well financed howl of rage against Catholicism. How the Church survives this turn, is not clear. It’ll require a lot of hard work and prayers.

***

Six years before the Pope arrived [in 1979], Ireland had joined the EU, giving it access to markets much larger than previously when its trade had been predominantly with Britain. That, combined with an influx of foreign investment, transformed Ireland from one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the wealthiest. Its economy grew so powerfully in the 1990s that Ireland became known as the Celtic tiger…

Voices began to be raised in public for a liberalisation of laws on contraception, divorce and even abortion. If peace came dropping slow on the island of Ireland, social change was rapid. Restrictions on contraception were lifted. Though a referendum to legalise divorce was heavily defeated in 1986, it was passed in 1995. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993, albeit 30 years later than in the UK. A rift began to grow slowly and silently between the church and society.

It was, of course, the paedophile priests who sent that relationship into freefall. Sunday Mass attendance, which was more than 90 per cent in the 1970s, had fallen to 34 per cent by 2013. The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, estimates that in the capital, the figure has plunged to only 18 per cent. Many in Ireland now describe themselves as “post-Catholics”. They are, according to Michael Kelly, the editor of The Irish Catholic newspaper, “functionally atheist”…

“I appreciate how gay and lesbian men and women feel on this day. That they feel this is something that is enriching the way they live. I think it is a social revolution.”

The archbishop personally voted no, arguing that gay rights should be respected “without changing the definition of marriage”. “I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the church,” he added.

***

Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown was speaking for the “no” position on the referendum, as supported by the bishops of Ireland, in a debate on the Shaun Doherty Show.

“People have to make their own mature decision, be it yes or be it no. I would hate for people to be voting no for bad reasons, for bigoted reasons, for nasty reasons, for bullying reasons. People have to make up their own minds and I’m quite happy that people can do that in front of God, be it yes or be it no,” Bishop McKeown said.

***

The vote in Ireland illuminates a dynamic shift on LGBT issues among Catholics and people of faith across the globe. Today about 60% of Catholics in the United States support gay marriage, compared to about 36% a decade ago.

The idea of an inclusive Catholic Church may have seemed like a pipe dream not many years ago, but under the tenure of Francis the Troublemaker, it doesn’t seem that farfetched. Two summers ago the Pope tweeted, “Let the Church always be a place of mercy and hope, where everyone is welcomed, loved and forgiven.”

Of course, there is little popular appetite on either side of the border even to talk about Irish reunification, given its association with violence and the unlikelihood of it coming to pass anytime soon. And in the short term, Friday’s referendum may intensify Unionist opposition to a united Ireland, if that’s possible. But if the line separating north from south is ever to be erased, and if Yeats’ brand of Protestant nationalism is ever to revive, an Irish government that is committed to secular equality and a strict separation of church and state is a necessary precondition — and one that the referendum helps achieve.

***

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who was promoting his autobiography at the Hay Festival in Wales, told an audience that “I hope they vote no. I do think marriage is marriage,” in an attempt to persuade voters in Ireland to vote No in its same-sex marriage referendum.

Article 41 of the Constitution, which is what we are being asked to change, is called ‘The Family’. It describes the family as the “natural, primary and fundamental” unit of society. It says it is “indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State”…

If this referendum goes through, we will asked to believe that in all matters relating to the family, including the rearing of children, two men or two women are exactly the same as a man and a woman.

We are also being asked to believe that the biological ties don’t matter. Obviously two men or two women raising a child cannot both be the biological parents of the one child. We will be giving our full constitutional blessing to cutting the tie to the other biological parent if we vote Yes today.

***

There’s a profound irony here: Ireland’s political class calls for a Yes vote to prove that Ireland has moved on from its intolerant religious past, and yet some of that old intolerance is being rehabilitated by the very people backing gay marriage. They shush dissent and demonise their opponents as effectively as any priest used to do, only in the name of Gays rather than God. Backing gay marriage has become, in Irish Independent columnist, Eilis O’Hanlon’s words, a way for influential people to ‘identify [themselves] as members of an enlightened elite’, ‘kindly metropolitan liberals versus nasty Catholic conservatives’. This referendum is now only ostensibly about gay marriage: more fundamentally it has become a means for a new, PC, post-traditionalist elite to distinguish itself from the allegedly hateful and gruff inhabitants of Ireland’s more rural, old-fashioned communities.

The president, Michael D Higgins, and the prime minister, Enda Kenny, back gay marriage. So does virtually every politician. Indeed, the main parties are enforcing the party whip on gay marriage, meaning any Senator or TD who votes against it is likely to be expelled from his or her party. According to the Irish Independent, even politicians who harbour ‘reservations about this major legislative change’ are not speaking out, ‘for fear of disobeying the party whip’. A professor of theology has written about a culture of ‘intimidation’ in political circles, saying it’s ‘incredible that the political parties have imposed the whip’ on this issue. Only one politician — one — has resigned his party’s whip over gay marriage.

So intense is the whipped political consensus that politicians, desperate to demonstrate their gay-marriage correctness, are openly flouting some of the Irish parliament’s longstanding rules. Wearing political badges is forbidden in Ireland’s parliament, so in recent weeks politicians have been asked to remove the ‘YES’ badges many of them have taken to wearing. And they have refused. And no less a figure than Joan Burton, the deputy prime minister, has supported them. Clearly, parliamentary rules come a poor second to making a public spectacle of one’s devotion to gay marriage. Wearing a ‘YES’ badge has become a shortcut to the moral highground, a passport to chattering-class respectability, and politicians won’t be taking them off for anyone.

Meanwhile, virtually the entire media are agitating for a Yes vote.

***

My family and I have been living this for 16 months, since I was attacked, without basis or evidence, by a drag queen on a TV talk show. In all my years observing and writing about the political life of Ireland, I have never encountered anything like the venom of the baying mob that descended on me afterwards, or the duplicity and cowardice of media people who joined in. What I have observed over this past 16 months has chilled me to the quick, and alerted me to the fragility of our democracy…

I met a man the other day who confided his belief that, in pushing this amendment, Enda Kenny had provoked in Irish society a “mental civil war”, which will have ramifications of their type just as serious as the Civil War of 93 years ago. He may be correct. The stories I’ve come across of intimidation and hate-mongering are for me unprecedented in over 30 years writing about Irish life and politics. I met men whose daughters begged them not to let anyone know they were thinking of voting No, lest they, the children, be ostracised by their peers…

There are countless examples of illegality and blackguardism: the tearing down of No posters, the gloating YouTube video boasting of this usurping of the democratic process, the egg-throwing, the harassing of a hotel in Galway until it cancelled an anti-amendment meeting.

This has been the most comprehensive betrayal of democratic principles by an establishment in living memory.

***

Gay marriage is going to come to this country by Supreme Court vote next month, but do not be under the illusion that this will settle anything. The “new climate of prohibition concerning certain forms of thought and speech, an Orwellian revisionism directed at texts and records bearing witness to old ideas” is coming to America too. If you don’t see this, you are being willfully blind. Bishops and leaders of the orthodox, or at least officially orthodox, churches — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — who are not soberly but unhesitatingly preparing their people for this is a sign of their dereliction of duty…

All of us Americans, whether we call ourselves liberals or conservatives, are liberals in this sense. I am no different. I believe in free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights and the other hallmarks of liberalism. Now that liberalism has evolved into hostility to what I believe to be true about religion, morality, and human nature, I — like all orthodox Christians — have to face the fact that liberalism, which all of us Americans took in with our mother’s milk, may ultimately be alien to our faith, because in the end, it enthrones the choosing Self over God or any conception of external, transcendent Truth…

We must be realistic about where we are, and where we are likely to go. Liberalism and its institutions — including, note well, market capitalism — are not destroying Christianity and the traditional family because they are being perverted. They are destroying Christianity and the traditional family because it is in their nature to do so. This is not being forced on people — though their desires have certainly been manipulated — but it is something they have chosen, because it expresses what they believe to be the truth about being, about man, about meaning, and about liberty.

***

One has to think that many of the “advances” our opponents are making is because people are simply tired of conflict. Like the parent that eventually buys the child the sugary cereal if they promise to not speak for the rest of the time they are in the store, many of the people who now support same-sex marriage are doing so just to make them shut up. Which, also like the parent that concedes to the child’s demand for the cereal, in the end only leads to more demands. That’s French’s last two sentences in the pull quote above in somewhat plainer language.

And that illustrates the second thing we have to do. We have to reach out to the people that are tired of the fight, not to bring them into the fight, but simply to make them a friend and to help them endure the noise. Many is the time in the store I have witnessed a parent just about to give in to the incessant demands of their child, and rather than tell the parent not to, or tell them how bad the cereal is for the child, or call their judgement into question, I just smile and say something like, “That tenacity is amazing, isn’t it?” The parent, now no longer feeling alone in the situation often tells the child “No” one more time. And the child, now feeling ganged up upon, usually quiets a bit.

This fight is not an opportunity for evangelism. Most people know there is something “off” about same-sex marriage. We don’t have to teach them why, we don’t have to help them memorize the related Bible verse, we just need to encourage them to go with their gut on this one. There is a time and a place for teaching and converting. This is not it.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/24/quotes-of-the-day-2062/feed/2633863859Jeb Bush: We must be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage, whatever the Supreme Court sayshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/18/jeb-bush-we-must-be-stalwart-supporters-of-traditional-marriage-whatever-the-supreme-court-says/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/18/jeb-bush-we-must-be-stalwart-supporters-of-traditional-marriage-whatever-the-supreme-court-says/#commentsMon, 18 May 2015 23:21:56 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3863160Via the Brody File, if you’re worried that the rumors about Jeb “evolving” on gay marriage are true, this should put you at ease. Not much wiggle room left in this answer.

David Brody: Conservative Christians are real concerned about the culture nowadays, especially on the marriage issue. They want a candidate that is going to fight on this issue. Are you their guy? Because they are concerned about the marriage issue…

Jeb Bush: Well, I’m concerned about it as well. I think traditional marriage is a sacrament. It’s talking about being formed by one’s faith, it’s at the core of the Catholic faith and to imagine how we are going to succeed in our country unless we have committed family life, committed child-centered family system is hard to imagine.

So, irrespective of the Supreme Court ruling because they are going to decide whatever they decide, I don’t know what they are going to do, we need to be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage.

David Brody asked him point blank if he thinks there’s a constitutional right to gay marriage and Jeb said no, although that’s less interesting to me than the “formed by one’s faith” passage above. After all, once upon a time Barack Obama didn’t think there was a right to SSM either. A pol’s view of that can change (and likely will, as the polls change). His view of what’s required of him by the sacraments of his Church is less flexible — or should be, since Obama also cited his faith for his phony opposition to gay marriage in 2008. Jeb, by all accounts I’ve read, takes his Catholic faith seriously, though. If he’s phrasing the question in these terms, presumably his position is fixed. Either that or he’s discovered that his weird “lose the primary to win the general election” approach to the GOP race is a loser, in which case he’s resolved to start making social conservatives happy ASAP.

But maybe we’re missing the point of this answer. Maybe the point is that the gay-marriage question is out of the people’s hands now, or will be soon if SCOTUS rules the way everyone expects, in which case there’s no point quibbling over policy. Gay marriage will be legal and Jeb will oppose it, and that’s really the end of the matter. Once the Court hands down its ruling the GOP need never bother about this topic again, apart from occasional red meat tossed to social cons about stripping the Court of marriage jurisdiction or passing a federal marriage amendment or some other legislative fix that Democrats will never allow. My takeaway from this interview: When Jeb says righties should remain stalwart supporters of traditional marriage even after the Court’s decision, what does that entail? Does it mean civil disobedience of gay-marriage laws by Christian state employees? Or does it mean, as Jeb seems to imply here, basically moving on from gay marriage and focusing on convincing more straight couples to marry in order to provide more stable homes for their kids? Details, please.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/05/18/jeb-bush-we-must-be-stalwart-supporters-of-traditional-marriage-whatever-the-supreme-court-says/feed/503863160Video: MSNBC host asks whether we can trust Catholic justices in Hobby Lobby casehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/25/video-msnbc-host-asks-whether-we-can-trust-catholic-justices-in-hobby-lobby-case/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/25/video-msnbc-host-asks-whether-we-can-trust-catholic-justices-in-hobby-lobby-case/#commentsTue, 25 Mar 2014 13:21:28 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=301995If one wants sober and careful analysis of legal issues, the last media outlet one would choose would be MSNBC — and Joy Reid demonstrates why. Taking a page from Jamie Stiehm and using a construct that would be called bigotry in any other context, Reid warns viewers that a Supreme Court full of Catholics are a threat to the progress toward a more secular nation, especially in the Hobby Lobby/Conestoga case being heard at the Supreme Court today. Can you really trust Catholics to interpret the law, Reid asks (via Truth Revolt and Jeff Dunetz):

Now, the most famous use of corporate personhood was Citizens United, which opened the door to corporate people spending lots of money to sway elections. The new cases ask whether corporations are not just people, but people who can have religious beliefs. Can the Hobby Lobby Craft Store chain, and Conestoga Wood Specialties of Pennsylvania claim that covering contraception in their employees’ health plans violates their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration act, which says government can’t substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion? And can a New Mexico photographer refuse to shoot a gay wedding through her corporate expression of herself? The Obama administration is arguing that corporations are, in fact, not people, and that they can’t shield themselves behind religious beliefs. The court that will decide includes six Catholic justices, some of whom have not been shy about asserting their religion. And all of this is taking place as the country becomes more secular. Even as the fervently religious fight even harder than ever to push creationism in taxpayer funded schools, and on science TV shows. And where the question of corporate personhood has gone from whether the railroad has to pay its taxes to whether corporations can be religious people. The question is do you trust this court to make those decisions?

The decision will almost certainly avoid the discussion of corporate personhood, as Lyle Denniston predicted last week at SCOTUSBlog, because the Supreme Court doesn’t need to go that far to reach a decision in either direction:

But the Court need not go that far, even if it should lean toward ruling in favor of an exemption within the business world from the ACA’s contraceptive mandate. It could decide that the Green family and the Hahn family have a right to exercise their religious beliefs in the way they run their business firms, and that this mandate intrudes on those rights.

Along the way, of course, the Justices would have to find a way around the conventional business law notion that corporations stand apart from their owners. But they could do that with a very narrow definition of the rights of the owners of a company that is so closely held that it is essentially not a public corporation, except in name. Again, though, that would grow out of the rights of the owners, not of the corporate entity itself.

It wouldn’t necessarily need to even go that far. The court could find that government cannot establish a crisis in contraception access that makes it a compelling state interest in the first place, which puts it at odds with the RFRA. We’ll have more on that later, though.

Jeff points out the hypocrisy at MSNBC evident in this clip:

If there was three African-Americans on the court and someone protested that those three black Justices could not fairly judge civil rights cases, there would be screams of racism coming from the media, and those screams would be justified.

However because Joy Reid was questioning Catholic judges, it’s no big deal. In the world of the mainstream media it’s only bigotry when directed toward certain groups, blacks, women, Muslims, Hispanics, etc. But Joy Reid’s comments were just as bigoted as anything coming from David Duke. Ms Reid should be chastised for her bigotry–but that will never happen because Catholics are not one of MSNBC’s “protected groups.”

It’s worth noting that the six Catholic justices on the Supreme Court rarely reach any kind of consensus, unless it is a consensus shared by the whole court. Reid bases her argument of religious bias on literally nothing at all but her own prejudice. One suspects it’s because of the desperation the Left has over the Hobby Lobby case and the HHS mandate in general, but it may just be that Reid has a bias against Catholics in public life apart from this, too.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/25/video-msnbc-host-asks-whether-we-can-trust-catholic-justices-in-hobby-lobby-case/feed/145301995New look at the “benefits” of contraception?http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/20/new-look-at-the-benefits-of-contraception/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/20/new-look-at-the-benefits-of-contraception/#commentsThu, 20 Mar 2014 19:21:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=301456Since the Griswold Supreme Court decision in 1965, contraception has become integrated into almost every facet of American culture. Whole industries have sprung up around it, and governments and schools around the nation spend millions giving contraception out for “free.” And, of course, the federal government is now saying almost every single business and non-profit organization in America must provide it for “free” to employees.

Which makes some recent noise in mainstream media sources about the harms of contraception quite interesting, and potentially very effective to spreading the word about the real harms of contraception to women. First it was former Winter Olympics hopeful and former Townhall.com intern Megan Henry — sidelined due to use of the intrauterine device NuVaRing — whose joining of a class-action lawsuit against NuVaRing parent company Merck Pharmaceuticals made news across the country.

Then there was a 10,000-word essay from Vanity Fair, which asked “why, despite evidence of serious risk, a potentially lethal contraceptive remains on the market.” And Ricki Lake’s documentary on hormonal contraception and “the unexposed side effects of these powerful medications” is getting backlash from writers at Jezebel.com and Slate.

Registered nurse and pro-life activist Jill Stanek told me this exposure is no surprise, delayed though it is:

“In 2005, the World Health Organization classified the morning-after pill as a Class 1 carcinogen — as dangerous as cigarette smoke and asbestos,” Stanek said. “With all of the studies showing links between oral contraception and greater chances of glaucoma, heart risk and breast-cancer risk, it’s amazing any women use them. And the NuvaRing lawsuit shows how dangerous hormonal contraception is.”

“The American people are belatedly finding out from the mainstream media just how far we’ve gone off the path of proper care of the bodies of women,” stated Stanek. She said media attention to the issue, as well prominent political attention to issues like the HHS contraception mandate, has created “a perfect storm for greater knowledge by women about why they should use better wisdom and responsibility in their sexual practices.”

Is increased contraception use related to a decline in abortion rates and occurrences? According to (Live Action’s Libby] Barnes, a look at other nations shows increased contraception use declines abortions only after decades of increasing them – and the new rate is much higher than the old one.

In other words, contraception only lowers abortion rates from abnormally high levels, not overall.

The grievous harms of contraception to the bodies of women are not just seen in the traditional physical sense. As Ed pointed out when we discussed this topic at CPAC, there is also great harm to “human dignity,” something the Catholic Church was ridiculed for predicting 45 years ago:

“If you want to know how harmful [contraception] is, go back to Humanae Vitae,” says Morrissey, “in which basically the Pope predicted everything that followed. At the time, he was ridiculed. … He basically predicted the explosion of pornography, abuse – not just abuse in the legal sense that we talk about it, but in terms of using people in a disposable sense, for fleeting moments of sensory pleasure, which is an affront to human dignity, which is at the center of our faith.”

Obviously, women won’t stop using birth control overnight — and their male sex partners aren’t likely to ask them to stop — but it’s important that young women receive all of the facts surrounding the use of contraception. This is especially true as the HHS mandate forces coverage of products with literally deadly potential.

Update (Dustin): A family physician who reads Hot Air e-mailed that my post had a couple of factual errors. In re-examining the post, I did have one, though I will address his other points as well:

1. I mistakenly said NuVaRing is an intrauterine device. It is, in fact, an intravaginal device.

2. He pointed out that many contraceptives have blood clot risks. This is true, and points to more evidence that contraceptives are harmful to the health of women.

3. According to this physician, NuVaRing has about the same risk factor for thrombosis as a number of other contraceptives. Again, this point from the doctor is well-taken, and shows more reason for women to avoid contraception.

4. The physician accused me of insinuating that Megan Henry’s joining the class-action lawsuit against Merck is an indicator of guilt, but in fact all I did was state that a woman who was harmed by NuVaRing has made news for both her illness and for joining the class-action lawsuit against Merck.

A Merck spokesperson has informed me that the settlement offer to the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit does not admit guilt.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/20/new-look-at-the-benefits-of-contraception/feed/604301456Pope Francis: Second look at civil unions?http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/05/pope-francis-second-look-at-civil-unions/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/05/pope-francis-second-look-at-civil-unions/#commentsWed, 05 Mar 2014 20:21:21 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=299719Did he really mean this or is this yet another case of the media exaggerating Francis’s more liberal-sounding pronouncements to better suit their agenda? Seems fairly clear, at least, that he thinks the Church could tolerate civil unions between heterosexual couples, although that raises the question of what “tolerance” would mean. Cohabitation presumably isn’t a problem, just as contracts between men and women aren’t a problem. The problem, potentially, is relaxing the sanction against premarital sex.

Pope Francis suggested the Catholic Church could tolerate some types of nonmarital civil unions as a practical measure to guarantee property rights and health care. He also said the church would not change its teaching against artificial birth control but should take care to apply it with “much mercy.”…

“Matrimony is between a man and a woman,” the pope said, but moves to “regulate diverse situations of cohabitation (are) driven by the need to regulate economic aspects among persons, as for instance to assure medical care.” Asked to what extent the church could understand this trend, he replied: “It is necessary to look at the diverse cases and evaluate them in their variety.”

In January, the Pope recalled a little girl in Buenos Aires who told her teacher that she was sad because “my mother’s girlfriend doesn’t like me.”

“The situation in which we live now provides us with new challenges which sometimes are difficult for us to understand,” the Pope told leaders of religious orders, adding that the church “must be careful not to administer a vaccine against faith to them.”

A Christian friend who supports gay marriage has always insisted to me that there’s no real contradiction between her faith and her views on SSM. Religion has its sphere and civil society has its sphere; so long as the Church gets to set the rules in its own house, i.e. by not having to recognize or perform same-sex marriages, it can be agnostic about which sorts of relationships the government chooses to legally recognize. I don’t know if Francis would go that far, although there are credible reports that he privately endorsed civil unions for gays in Argentina as a potential compromise position while the country was debating legalizing gay marriage. Either way, the bit above about taking care not to vaccinate people against faith is consistent with his pronouncements on family/sexual matters so far: He seems reluctant to get caught up in these disputes for fear that they’ll sidetrack his bigger-picture vision for the Church, which has more to do with charity for the poor and less with culture-war flashpoints that risk alienating more socially liberal believers. It’s not quite a “truce” a la Mitch Daniels but more a matter of emphasis. Or so it seems to a humble atheist.

Meanwhile, back home in the U.S., 59 percent now support legalizing gay marriage versus 34 percent who oppose it. Those who “strongly” oppose it are down to 24 percent, the first time in ABC/WaPo’s polling that that number has dipped below 30. The numbers that really grabbed me, though, come from another recent poll on SSM conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Can this really be true?

Only 22 percent of gay-marriage opponents know that most Americans now support the practice? That makes me wonder if, as some SSM supporters (like me) expected, the rash of high-profile court decisions has convinced opponents that legalization is a purely top-down phenomenon imposed by cultural elites rather than something that’s gained wide popular acceptance. Politically, you’re much better off having this done through legislatures to show that the changes enjoy democratic legitimacy than having it done by judges. Oh well. Too late now.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the President was “looking forward” to visiting the popular new leader of the Roman Catholic Church at the Vatican.

Kerry did not say when the trip would take place…

Kerry, a Roman Catholic, met with Vatican leaders on Tuesday to discuss foreign policy and economic issues, including Francis’ outspoken stance on income inequality worldwide.

He did not meet with the Pope.

Normally the president meeting the Pope is a simple goodwill-building gesture towards America’s Catholics but O’s got more at stake this time. Five years ago, at the height of Hopenchange, The One’s own endorsement might have been enough to persuade swing voters that God hates income inequality and wants government to do something about it. Five years later, at the depths of Hopenchange, he needs to appeal to a higher power:

When a White House speechwriter turned in a draft of a major speech on economic policy this month, President Obama sent it back with an unusual instruction: Add a reference to the pope…

Quoting the pope isn’t likely to yield direct electoral dividends for Obama’s party — the once-vaunted “Catholic vote” largely disappeared long ago. But in a string of effusive praise, the president has made clear he sees the pope as a like-minded thinker and potentially useful ally in a crucial battle of ideas, particularly on the importance of shrinking the gulf between rich and poor, a subject Obama has pushed repeatedly but with limited success…

To others, Obama’s interest in the pope exemplifies the way some liberals, cheered by Francis’ new focus, have expressed their hope for a church that puts less emphasis on issues like abortion or gay rights and more on immigration, welfare or poverty programs.

Obama is the “preeminent example of a liberal falling in love with Francis,” said Candida Moss, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Topics like O-Care’s contraception mandate and infanticide will, I take it, be discreetly avoided. Serious question: Will aligning himself with the Pope do anything to move O’s income-inequality agenda forward? Francis is popular with Americans generally and fantastically popular with American Catholics specifically, but as of late November, there was no evidence that his popularity was bringing people back to the Church in the U.S. People like him, but maybe not enough to act on it. Meanwhile, who’s listening to Obama’s sermons on sharing the wealth and remaining unmoved by them unless/until they know the Pope would like to see a bit more wealth-sharing too? My hunch is that people’s views of redistribution are similar to their views of contraception: They may admire the Vatican’s position as nobly motivated but ultimately they have to protect themselves.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/14/inevitable-obama-to-meet-soon-with-pope-francis/feed/63293429Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/26/quotes-of-the-day-1567/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/26/quotes-of-the-day-1567/#commentsWed, 27 Nov 2013 02:41:50 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=288732Pope Francis attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny” and beseeched global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality, in a document on Tuesday setting out a platform for his papacy and calling for a renewal of the Catholic Church…

In it, Francis went further than previous comments criticizing the global economic system, attacking the “idolatry of money”, and urged politicians to “attack the structural causes of inequality” and strive to provide work, healthcare and education to all citizens.

He also called on rich people to share their wealth. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” Francis wrote in the document issued on Tuesday.

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses 2 points?”

***

Francis said trickle down policies have not been proven to work and they reflect a “naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.”

“In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Pope Francis wrote.

“My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost,” he tweeted in May. A day earlier he denounced as “slave labour” the conditions endured by Bangladeshi workers killed in a building collapse. In September he said that God wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world and yet we live in a global economic order that worships “an idol called money”.

There is no denying the radicalism of this message, a frontal and sustained attack on what he calls “unbridled capitalism”, with its “throwaway” attitude to everything from unwanted food to unwanted old people. His enemies have certainly not missed it. If a man is to be judged by his opponents, note that this week Sarah Palin denounced him as “kind of liberal” while the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs has lamented that this pope lacks the “sophisticated” approach to such matters of his predecessors. Meanwhile, an Italian prosecutor has warned that Francis’s campaign against corruption could put him in the crosshairs of that country’s second most powerful institution: the mafia.

Sanders says he continues to welcome Francis’ criticism of the global financial system, which both the senator and the pope say has plunged more of the world into poverty while benefiting the wealthy few.

“At a time when the gap between rich and everyone else is growing wider, at a time when Wall Street and large financial institutions are exerting extraordinary power over the American and world economy, I applaud the pope for continuing to speak out on these enormously important issues,” Sanders said. “Pope Francis is reminding people of all walks of life, and all religious backgrounds, that we can and must do better.”

***

Albeit in somewhat passive terms, the Church had made its political and economic position clear: It rejected communism, and specifically its suppression of religion, in favor of the West and democracy—which were tied tightly to free-market economic principles. Many years later, the Polish Pope John Paul II was given credit for helping to undermine communist rule in his country, where Catholic churches provided a space for anti-communist artists and thinkers to hold discussions and distribute anti-regime writings.

This is more than just a lecture about ethics; it’s a statement about who should control financial markets. At least right now, Francis says, the global economy needs more government control—an argument that would have been unthinkable for the pope just 50 years ago.

***

It’s interesting to think of Pope Francis’ assessment in light of Pope John Paul II’s past condemnation of communism and the “social assistance state.” In 1991, he observed…

“In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of state, the so-called ‘Welfare State.’ This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoke very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the ‘Social Assistance State.’ Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.

“By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending, In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them who act as neighbors to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not simply material but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need.”

***

[W]hat I think is curious about this document is a longstanding peeve of mine. Ever since the Galileo incident, the Catholic Church has generally tried to be careful to get its science right before it opines on ethical matters related to science. It takes seriously questions of bioethics and has developed internal expertise on those issues. Yet when it comes to economics, the Church seems to have no qualms about opining on issues of economics without even the slightest idea of what it is talking about.

I mean, seriously?

“204. We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.”

Well darn that John Paul II for helping to bring freedom to Poland and getting rid of all those “decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes” that were so beneficial to the Poles under Communism.

***

Capitalism does not breed poverty; it alleviates it. Compare the life expectancy of a medieval serf–rarely 30 years–to someone living in Western Europe today: Pope Francis, for example, who has reached the ripe old age of 76 thanks to modern medicine. He lived through the Cold War and its showcase of the obvious disparity between the United States, a land of economic “survival of the fittest,” according to Francis, and the Soviet Union. It was “a country with some of the most fertile land on the continent of Europe,” writes economist and TAS contributor Thomas Sowell, where the market principles that Pope Francis rergards suspiciously were abandoned, and as a result “at least 6 million people starved to death in the 1930s[.]”…

The pope, who recognizes in his exhortation the importance of economics, should keep in mind that the limited resources of the world could not possibly be allocated or “distributed” without some sort of system that allocates them efficiently, taking into account supply and demand, as well as scarcity and the difficulty of production and extraction: that is, prices. For someone who writes of others’ displaying “crude and naïve trust”, the pope sometimes betrays a rather naïve understanding of economics.

***

I don’t wish to stand in the way of people enjoying other people’s prejudices, but Francis’s hyperbolic rants about the role and allegedly dictatorial power of free markets are embarrassing in their wrongness. Cheering them on is like donating money to a Creationist Museum, only with more potential impact…

More people have escaped poverty the past 25 years than were alive on the planet in 1800. Their “means of escape” was largely the introduction of at least some “laws of competition” in endeavors that had long been the exclusive domain of authoritarian, monopolistic governments…

To look upon the miracles of this world and lament the lack of “means of escape” is to advertise your own ignorance. To call it a “tyranny” is to do violence to any meaningful sense of that important word (much like Francis’s predecessor did with his silly “dictatorship of relativism” crack). And to make such absolutist statements as “everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest” is to admit up front that you are not primarily interested in spreading truth, but rather in exciting popular passions. Which I suppose makes sense.

***

Troubling? Yes, and that’s probably too gentle a word. If this was just a discussion within the Roman Catholic church aimed solely at how its members should behave that, for the most part, would be up to them. But the pope’s words are rather more than that. In Francis, we see a charming and charismatic advocate (complete with large megaphone and the attention of a sizeable slice of the world) for economic policies of a type that have failed and failed and failed again, not least in the Argentina of his youth, the Argentina of Perón, the Argentina that he evidently still sees as some sort of model.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/26/quotes-of-the-day-1567/feed/632288732Syrian jihadis behead Catholic priest while crowd cheershttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/01/syrian-jihadis-behead-catholic-priest-while-crowd-cheers/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/01/syrian-jihadis-behead-catholic-priest-while-crowd-cheers/#commentsTue, 02 Jul 2013 00:01:20 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=267926Once upon a time, years ago, I would have posted the video on the theory that it’s important for the public to see with their own eyes what these degenerates are capable of. But we’ve all seen that, more than once, by now. There’s a link to the clip at the Blaze. Follow it there if you’re inclined.

As TheBlaze reported last week, [Francois] Murad, 49, was setting up a monastery in Gassanieh, northern Syria. Last Sunday, on the Christian leader’s Sabbath, extremist militants trying to topple President Bashar Assad breached the monastery and grabbed Murad…

The Catholic news service quotes local sources who report that the radical Al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, or Al-Nusra Front, was behind the savage killing.

In video posted by Live Leak purporting to show the execution, dozens of men and boys are seen cheering on as three men are seated on the ground awaiting their grisly fate.

The men are methodically beheaded one at a time by men holding what appears to be a simple kitchen knife after which the heads are placed on top of the bodies.

Assad’s the greater of two evils, huh?

Three important points here about the burgeoning U.S./Sunni Arab intervention in Syria and how it might benefit lunatics like the Nusra Front. One: Serious weaponry is already making its way into the country. Not just small arms and anti-tank weapons of the sort that the White House will be supplying to “moderate” rebels, but jet-killing shoulder-fired MANPADS that can bring down commercial airliners. Qatar’s already sent a few of those to rebel elements; some of the weapons come, of course, from Qaddafi’s looted stockpile in Libya. It’s unclear whether that’s with or without America’s tacit approval (probably with), but remember that the CIA’s reportedly training some rebel units how to use arms like that. If we strongly disapprove of the Sunnis sending in the big guns, we have a strange way of showing it.

Two: Syria’s usually spoken of as a Sunni/Shiite civil war but there’s infighting among the Sunni rebel ranks too and doubtless much more to come if/when the rebels push Assad back and get their own sectarian state carved out for them as part of some sort of peace process. Reuters reported last week that a rift between the Nusra Front, who beheaded Francois Murad, and our old friends in Al Qaeda in Iraq threatens to lead to a jihadi civil war within the wider civil war. That’d be just fine from the U.S. perspective — more dead jihadis is always good, and if the fundie elements among the rebels are punching each other, that gives the, ahem, “moderates” some breathing space. But the more divided the rebels are, the easier it is for Assad to roll over them while they’re distracted, which is precisely the outcome the White House is trying to stave off. And if the jihadis put their differences aside and postpone the Nusra/Qaeda war until the Sunnis have their own enclave, then you risk having Sunni civilians caught in the middle of it while they’re ostensibly trying to build a state. What’s the U.S. play then?

Three: It remains very hard to tell which rebels are good-ish and which are not, which makes this whole U.S./Sunni arms endeavor fraught with clusterfark opportunities. This piece at Quartz does a nice job of spelling out the difficulties of vetting rebel units. Too many groups (many of them overlapping), too many agendas, and too little control over the situation: We’re flying, if not totally blind, at least into a very dense fog in trying to pick winners. I’ll leave you with this, from the NYT piece about Qatar’s role in arming the sort of people who decapitate priests:

But Charles Lister, an analyst with the IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London who follows the Syria opposition groups, said that there was evidence in recent weeks that Qatar had increased its backing of hard-line Islamic militant groups active in northern Syria.

Mr. Lister said there was no hard evidence that Qatar was arming the Nusra Front, but he said that because of existing militant dynamics, the transfer of Qatari-provided arms to certain targeted groups would result in the same practical effect.

“It’s inevitable that any weapons supplied by a regional state like Qatar,” he said via e-mail, “will be used at least in joint operations with Jabhet al-Nusra — if not shared with the group.”